This Movie Is Rated Wu

Even by the lofty standards of hip-hop multihyphenates, the RZA's evolution from Staten Island crack-slinger to rap-supergroup ringleader to tarantino-ratified movie auteur is (to put it in our best Wu-Tang nomen-Clan-ture) some high-level Bruce Lee shit. As he finished up The Man with the Iron Fists, his kung fu saga Starring Russell Crowe, the RZA gave Alex Pappademas a glimpse into his next act as an "important dude" in Hollywood

Ditching school in New York City in the early 1980s to watch kung fu movies on 42nd Street was not without its perils. Truant officers wise to the drawing power of the Deuce patrolled the area, which—back before Rudy Giuliani terraformed Times Square into an LED-lit outdoor mall—was still an excitingly scummy locus of off-brand cinema. Young Robert Diggs, AWOL from Curtis High School in Staten Island, got pinched more than once. Such was the lure of the neighborhood's movies and the accompanying experience. Forty-second Street was real: "Sitting next to a nigga sniffing glue or coke or smoking dust or weed," says Diggs, who is now 43 years old and better known as the RZA, onetime Abbot of the Wu-Tang Clan. "Back in those days, those theaters—you could feel the shit on your feet, the slime, in those days. Slime."

Kung fu movies crane-kicked him in the brain when he was 9 years old, watching Bruce Lee's Fury of the Dragon on a bill with Black Samurai—featuring Lee's Enter the Dragon co-star, the Afroed karate champion Jim Kelly—at Staten Island's St. George Theatre. He's never forgotten that double feature, which isn't surprising. What's more surprising is that he seems to have never forgotten any of the double or triple features he caught during those years. Asked to name a couple, he says he could name a hundred.

"I could literally name a hundred of them," he says, "but let me do twenty. Godfather of Kung Fu, Fists of the Double K, and The Chinese Mack, triple feature. Ghostly Fighter. Quentin loved this one—Fearless Fighters. Five Deadly Venoms, Executioners from Shaolin, and Unbeatable Dragon. Triple feature. Fists of the White Lotus, that played with 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Five Masters of Death at a matinee. The one that was newest at that time would be 36 Chambers, which was 1978; Five Masters of Death was 1974, but I didn't know that. I saw them all at the same time. They'd put them together because a certain actor was in them. For instance, you'd get Chinatown Kid, Brave Archer, and Heroes Two, all starring Alexander Fu Sheng. You get the Jimmy Wang Yu movies—Hammer of God, One-Armed Swordsman. I hated Wang Yu movies. I love 'em now, but I hated 'em back then. That's enough. I'll give you a last one: Snake in Eagle's Shadow, Big Brawl, and Master with Cracked Fingers. Three Jackie Chans. Triple feature. How many is that?"

Only nineteen, actually, but the point has been made.

We're sitting on the back patio of a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, in August, around seven at night. RZA still has a place in New Jersey and a Jersey driver's license in his wallet, but he's lived out here for a couple of years. "I've seen a lot of New York. A lot of wild life. Love New York," he says. "But I love it out here. For me, it's a great change of polarity." (A few minutes from now he will illustrate a statement about how small an amount of crack would get you a ten-year prison sentence back in the day by pointing to the side order of sesame- seared tofu on a plate in front of him. I don't want to belabor the hood-to-Hollywood aspects of his story, but if you want a hood-to- Hollywood moment, there it is.)

Over the years, RZA has been photographed wearing a vampire-fanged gold grill, a Green Hornet–style domino mask, and even a set of Wolverine-like metal talons—anything to freak out the squares and thrill the Wu-Tang faithful, as Comic-Con-crazy a fan base as you'll find in or out of hip-hop. But tonight he's left his supervillain props at home. He's wearing pricey but unflashy sneakers and black-framed Gucci glasses that still have the little Gucci sticker on one lens; his haircut is mathematically precise.

A waitress comes over, apologetic, and tells RZA that his agent has called the restaurant and asked them to ask him to pick up his cell phone, which he's been ignoring. On cue, it rings; RZA answers, tells his agent that, yes, he made it to the interview, that he's sitting here talking and eating sweet-potato fries. These days, he explains after hanging up, his team is on him like the police. "The police, kid! I'm an important dude now," he says.

Then, lest this be taken as a complaint, he adds, "It's good to be important. It's nice to be nice."

People are concerned about RZA's whereabouts because he's got a movie coming out in November, The Man with the Iron Fists. He wrote the story, co-wrote the script with his buddy, Hostel director Eli Roth, and directed it. (Quentin Tarantino gets a "presented by" credit. Quentin's a friend of RZA's, too—that's who RZA meant when he said "Quentin" just now. RZA calls Quentin "Quentin." Quentin, when RZA quotes him, calls RZA "Bobby.")

We're joined by Rick Yune, the Korean- American actor who played the bad guy in the first Fast and the Furious, who serves as the taciturn Teller to RZA's Penn, silently mowing down bowl after bowl of kale while RZA monopolizes the conversation. I keep meaning to ask Rick something, but we never get past "So, do you live around here?" (He divides his time between L.A. and London. You heard it here first.) Yune is in Iron Fists, playing X-Blade, wearing a suit full of spring-loaded knives made by RZA's character, a freed American slave who works as a blacksmith in nineteenthcentury China, forging implements of death for a village of warring clans. Lucy Liu's in it, too, and so, improbably, is Academy Award winner Russell Crowe, giving what may be the loosest and funniest performance of his career—think of Brando in The Missouri Breaks—as a mercenary named Jack Knife.

It's a big, ridiculous martial-arts epic full of imaginatively staged death and dismemberment, and a worthy, respectful tribute to the masters of chop-socky cinema. I'd call it the best movie ever directed by a major hiphop artist if the compliment didn't feel so backhanded; instead, let's just say it's the first movie ever directed by a major hip-hop artist that feels like the work of an actual director—albeit one who's not above servicing fans by needle-dropping "Shame on a Nigga" under his movie's opening fight scene.